The story of Instagram's success is like a Silicon Valley fairytale, with the company getting a tremendous drive. Launched in 2010, the app takes itself only eight weeks to develop before launching on Apple's iOS, and within a year and a half, Facebook acquired the company in 2012 for $ 1 billion in cash and stock.
Instagram has taken the mobile photo-sharing niche by storm and has become a dominant name. Present-day, it has over 700 million users around the globe and has become one of the largest social networks.
KevinSystrom and Mike Krieger founded this photo-sharing app in a co-working space in 2010. Systrom was a marketing guy who, at night learned to code and launched his application, named Burbn.
Soon, Systrom met his friends working from VC firms and got them to discuss Burbn. Just after the first meeting he left his job and raised $500,000 for his adventure.
Mike Krieger was the first person on his team. They found the application very common and they decided to pivot their model to communicate with images.
They stripped the app of all features except uploading photos, commenting, and linking it. And so it was called Instagram as people were transferring a sort of instant telegram through it.
In a very short period, Instagram became the best photography app making over 100,000 users in a week and one million in 2 months.
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On average, every day 70 million photos in a day are uploaded on Instagram. That comes out to nearly 3 million an hour and approx 50,000 every minute.
Kevin Systrom (@kevin) posted the first-ever photo on Instagram on Jul 16, 2010.
The most followed person on Instagram is Selena Gomez. She has over 69.26 million followers ahead of Taylor Swift who has 69.13 million of her followers.
The top five people on Instagram are all women. Justin Bieber holds the six positions. He is the man with the highest number of followers, ranking just behind Beyonce in followers and a bit ahead of Cristiano Rinaldo.
Kendall Jenner has the most liked a picture on Instagram, and it is a selfie. This image has an impressive 3.5 million likes and 167,000 comments.
Although videos are growing more popular on different social sites, on Instagram photos still get 36% more likes than videos. On average, photos are getting more likes than videos on Instagram.
Moreover, photos with faces get 38% more likes than photos without faces. So if you are not getting enough likes, make sure your pictures have a face in them.
Instagram has come up with advertising features in October 2013 only for select brands. It started advertising for all in September 2015.
As of 2017, there are over 1 billion active users on the platform up from 800 million in 2017). Half of those users are active daily.
The hashtags vital for engagement on Instagram. Posts having at least one hashtag get 12.6% more engagement than those without any hashtag.
5 PM on Wednesday is considered as the best time to post on Instagram for the most engagement.
